It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the
world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure
humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried
in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached
after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the
winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

The big takeaway from this should be that climate change truly is a threat to civilization. But, I have to say, that melting permafrost wasn’t taken into consideration during the design of this vault seems like a glaring oversight.

“If there was a worst case scenario where there was so much water,
or the pumping systems failed, that it made its way uphill to the
seed vault, then it would encounter minus 18 [degrees celsius] and
freeze again. Then there’s another barrier [the ice] for entry
into the seed vault,” Fowler says. In other words, any water that
floods into the tunnel has to make it 100 meters downhill, then
back uphill, then overwhelm the pumping systems, and then manage
not to freeze at well-below-freezing temperatures. Otherwise,
there’s no way liquid is getting into the seed bank — so the
seeds are probably safe. […]

Still worried? Maybe this will help you exhale: “We did this
calculation; if all the ice in the world melted — Greenland,
Arctic, Antarctic, everything — and then we had the world’s
largest recorded tsunami right in front of the seed vault. So,
very high sea levels and the worlds largest Tsunami. What would
happen to the seed vault?” Fowler says. “We found that the seed
vault was somewhere between a five and seven story building above
that point. It might not help the road leading up to the seed
vault, but the seeds themselves would be OK.”

Sounds like the vault itself is designed to survive a climate apocalypse — it’s just the entry that isn’t.